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People on high have been preaching the wonder of continuous integration for a while now. It’s been all about Jenkins forever. Jenkins is still the #1 choice for most people, but I recently ran into Travis CI and at least short term, this is going to be the solution for our shop.

What is Continuous Integration for PHP?

CI to most people involves building and running integration tests. PHP clearly doesn’t build, but good PHP still has unit tests / integration tests / functional tests — so CI for PHP is running those tests before code merges.

What makes Travis CI good?

Probably ease of use. There is no setup of a “travis server”. It’s a service that they run. You hook it to a repo you have access to and set up a config file and it’s good to go.

But this only works with github?

That’s probably the biggest detractor. It’s currently built exclusively for use with github. Which is awesome for github projects, but not every project can be on github. We don’t always have control over where our repos are — and not everyone is an open source person.